Ann Beattie - Another You

God, they were all so self-absorbed: Cheryl; Livan; McCallum, Susan McCallum; Sophia. Whoever had built the two snowpeople was a jokester amid people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take a joke. Sonja, though, was not crazy, and he intended to give her the long version of everything once he got home. He would make her see that the students’ problems had seemed too sad and bizarre — and, at the same time, inconsequential — to burden her with. Being sane, she would understand.

AFGHAN TUCKED AROUND her legs, Sonja listened as Marshall began at the beginning, giving her information she already had about Livan Baker, segueing into a discussion of Cheryl Lanier. She was his student, from a large family in Virginia: not brilliant, but dedicated; a person interested in learning. How he picked her up hitchhiking because she was young and poor and wet. How he’d taken her for coffee ( omit mention of food, Marshall ), how he’d been surprised when she confided in him ( will Sonja put two and two together, realize that the time he called, claiming to be with someone named Thomas, or Todd, or whatever name he came up with, it was actually Cheryl Lanier? ). He assumed Sonja’s deepening frown was an expression of concern for the people involved.

Earlier that afternoon, Sonja had gone to the hospital to see McCallum, whose recovery was not progressing very well. First an infection had set back the course of physical therapy, then he’d become allergic to one of the medicines. He had fallen asleep after talking to her for just fifteen minutes, she said. It was as if McCallum, overnight, had become an old man. Her talking about McCallum, though, had seemed the perfect opportunity to fill her in on what she didn’t know about his involvement (he thought, self-righteously: I didn’t sleep with her ) with the two girls (Sonja was his wife; he wasn’t going to call two girls “women”).

“Why are you telling me this?” she said.

“What?” he said.

“It’s a pretty straightforward question. I’m not trying to trick you, Marshall.”

“Who said I thought that? I’m just, I just … I’m not sure there’s any reason to tell you these things now, it’s just that I realized there were quite a few things you didn’t know, and I wasn’t intentionally keeping them from you. With all that’s gone on, I guess I thought there was enough to deal with without including unnecessary asides.”

“When did Cheryl Lanier stop being an ‘unnecessary aside’?”

That gave him a moment’s pause. He hadn’t expected to have to go on the defensive (he hadn’t slept with her; so what if he hadn’t said anything about a hamburger and a beer, a Jack Daniel’s — so what if those things had become “coffee”?).

“This other person … girl … a student of mine from the same poetry class Cheryl was in named Sophia Androcelli, very brash girl, can be quite bullish about announcing her opinions.… Sophia was in my office a while back, with a loose-leaf notebook of Cheryl’s. She apparently had a crush on me. Cheryl, I mean. She wrote me a letter and actually, you’ll be amused by this, said that while she was fond of me, or however she put it, I was too old for her. Anyway: an awful thing had happened to Cheryl. Really two awful things, pertaining to the same event. She said in the letter she’d been forced into sex with her godfather — this stuff is all so awful, it’s what you hear about on daytime TV or read articles about when you’re sitting in a waiting room, you really don’t know what to say — and she told Livan about it, and the next thing she knew, Livan had appropriated the story. And she’d written the letter — well, she’d written it because she had a crush on me, I guess, but she’d also written to apologize because, inadvertently, she’d made the situation worse for McCallum, and like everybody else, she assumes McCallum’s my great buddy and anything anybody might say to him, they might as well say to me. She wanted me to tell him about the rape, and about Livan Baker’s parroting her story, so McCallum … I don’t know; so McCallum would see how fucked-up Livan Baker was. As it turns out, it’s quite an irony that his wife got furious at him about something besides Livan Baker. But anyway, Cheryl told me, and now I’m telling you.”

“I don’t quite get it,” Sonja said.

“I know, it’s so convoluted. It’s just one kid who went through a traumatic event having the misfortune of rooming with a real loony, an undercover cop with a drug problem, for Christ’s sake … and when she left school, she wrote her teacher a letter to explain. A confession, because she felt guilty, even though anything she’d done was unintentional.”

“Her teacher?”

“Me,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. She was slouched in the chair McCallum had once sat in, little jumping embers sputtering in the fire, her feet, in the ballet flats, stretched out on the newspaper she’d read and then piled on the footstool. He could remember their former quiet nights of reading things aloud to one another from the newspaper, having leisurely dinners in which the only subjects of conversation weren’t disturbing things, their planning vacations, talking about possible house sales before it became a buyer’s market, relaxing. She tucked her hair behind her ears, which made him smile fondly at her. She looked rather like a schoolgirl herself, as she gazed up at him. Recently, she had been looking at him quite often — the night before, she had put down the book she was reading, propped up in bed, and simply stared. He had come out of the bathroom, mistakenly wearing her robe.

“Why did she leave school?” she said.

“I don’t know. I think it had all been too much for her. Generally.”

She shifted in the chair, glancing over her shoulder, probably considering whether to add wood to the fire. He hoped she wouldn’t; the discussion had gone on long enough for one night.

“You know, McCallum feels the way I do right now,” she said. “He says there’s no way he can go back to teaching. He doesn’t know what he wants to do. I suggested, sort of half seriously, that he think about selling real estate. It would give him plenty of time to read books, in this market. He was upset today because he still can’t concentrate. It was worrying him that there was a pile of books on the night table and he couldn’t remember which one he’d been reading. I think it’s common after something like what he’s gone through that the person forgets things and can’t concentrate. I tried to tell him that.”

“What about his son?”

“McCallum’s mother-in-law doesn’t want him to visit him in the hospital. Whether that’s for her sake or the boy’s sake, I don’t know.”

“How does McCallum feel about it?”

“Oh,” she said, letting out a long sigh. “I don’t know how McCallum feels. He’s a pretty hard one to read. I’m glad he’s your great buddy, not mine. I’d always wonder what he was really thinking.”

He snorted a little laugh. It was cold in the room. He got up and pulled the screen away from the fireplace, lit a section of tightly rolled newspaper he took from a brass bucket, and laid the quickly burning paper on the last remaining orange-centered log, then placed two others on top. He replaced the screen, centering it on the tiles.

“Whereas, I usually think I know what my husband is thinking, although tonight I don’t,” Sonja said.

“What?” he said.

“You know. My husband. You. The same person as ‘her teacher.’ ”

“What does that mean?” he said, dusting off his hands and sitting on the footstool, gently moving her feet aside to give himself a few extra inches. Her feet felt light, delicate. He was surprised at their weightlessness.